C4, 6 Aug, 8pm: Dispatches: Britain Under Attack

Phil Rees investigates the roots of Islamic extremism in the UK, exploring the Koranic teachings that lie behind the concept of jihad and anger at Western foreign policy, and the government's attempts to win the battle for British Muslims' hearts and minds​

One in 11 British Muslims backs suicide bombers, says Brown aide
By JAMES SLACK
Last updated at 22:43pm on 2nd August 2007​

As many as one in 11 British Muslims agree with and proactively support terrorism, a Government adviser has warned police.

Haras Rafiq also told officers at Scotland Yard that up to 20 per cent of the Muslim population ' sympathise' with militants, while stopping short of being prepared to 'blow themselves up'.

His remarks underline the scale of the task facing Gordon Brown to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, only a week after he promised an extra £70million to councils and community groups to fight extremism.

Mr Rafiq, an adviser to the Government's preventing extremism taskforce, said: "A percentage of people actually agree and support proactively the people that are deciding to blow themselves up.

"It varies, it can be 7 per cent, 5 per cent, 9 per cent."

With 1.6million Muslims living in the UK, nine per cent is the equivalent of 144,000 people supporting terrorism.

'Proactively' supporting terrorism is understood to mean the people are vocal in their support for fanatics, rather than actively helping them to commit atrocities.

Mr Rafiq, filmed by Channel 4's Dispatches, went on: "Next we can have a percentage of people that can actually sympathise.

"These people at this stage ... won't go out and be operational and won't decide to blow themselves up but can sympathise with the people that can blow themselves up.

"Again this can be in double digits. Then we have a percentage of the population that actually empathises with the people that blow themselves up. It could be 15 to 20 per cent.

"It could be somebody who says, 'I don't agree that these guys are blowing themselves up but I can actually understand why'."

Mr Rafiq, a member of the Sufi Muslim Council, made his presentation to Scotland Yard earlier this year, after almost two years of Government attempts to combat extremism in the wake of the July 7 bombings.

Critics argue that working parties and an attempt to persuade Muslim leaders and groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain to speak out against extremism have not had the desired impact.

The documentary reveals that fanatics are continuing to peddle a message of hatred in the UK.

This centres on persuading Muslims that the covenant of security that in return for safety and freedom, Muslims do not attack the nation that is their home - has been broken by draconian anti-terror laws and the war in Iraq.

Dispatches discovered that Abu Mohammed, a fanatical preacher based in Europe, managed to make a series of visits to Britain, lecturing to young Muslims in houses in Luton, before being banned by the Home Office in March this year.

He continues to radicalise followers here via the Internet.

Mohammed is filmed by reporter Phil Rees declaring: "We are in a state of war and no covenant exists...British Muslims should know that the British Government will do everything to frighten them, to make them very uncomfortable and they have to be prepared to pay the price and fight back."

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said yesterday that the Government is changing its approach to dealing with extremism.

She added: "It seems to me that what we should be doing is emphasising the values that we share which are under attack from terrorism-rather than trying to create a battle or war between those who oppose the terror and those who want to carry it out."

She suggested Muslim communities have not been best served by their leaders.

She backed moves, put in place by Ruth Kelly when she was Communities Secretary, to broaden the kinds of groups with which the Government engages.

Miss Smith told New Statesman magazine: "We've got to make serious attempts to go beyond those who have previously been seen as leaders of the community."

Haras Rafiq, a member of the Sufi Muslim Council filmed by Channel 4's Dispatches said,
"A percentage of people actually agree and support proactively the people that are deciding to blow themselves up. It varies, it can be 7 per cent, 5 per cent, 9 per cent."

From where does he get his figures!? Just think of a number, any number....

The maker of the film, Phil Rees, has written a very good article about the issues he tries to cover in the film. He is a strong critic of western foreign policy and western interventionism, particularly in the Muslim world, and has appeared on the Islam Channel many times. He wrote the book 'Dining with terrorists' (using the word 'terrorist' ironically) about various meetings with resistance groups around the world (Muslim and non-Muslim). Source.

Tea and al-Qaida sympathy
by Phil Rees

Channel 4 will allow a radical Muslim to voice his support for terrorism in a primetime slot tonight. Director Phil Rees says the media have a duty to air all sides of the debate

Abu Muhammed is a courteous, intelligent man. We first met in a London hotel earlier this year. He is of slight build and softly spoken. We sipped tea and discussed events in the Middle East.

Abu Muhammed, which is not his real name, is also linked to al-Qaida and in tonight's Dispatches on Channel 4, he justifies the July 7 bombings. "If somebody commits an aggression against you, you are allowed [in Islam] to commit an aggression against him. Millions of Iraqi children were killed as a result of the [Western] embargo and no-fly zone and we have to treat those responsible in kind. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. And it is very clear in the Qur'an; make your punishment proportionate to what was done against you."

He offered advice to British Muslims. "They need to arm themselves to prevent the kaffir [non-believer] from coming into their home, terrorising their families, frightening their children and invading their privacy . . . they have to be prepared to pay the price and fight back."

Most in the UK would label Abu Muhammed as a terrorist and argue that his words are too shocking for the British audience to hear. If he is reported, his utterances must be draped in moral outrage and treated as the frothing ranting of a demented man.

My rendezvous with Abu Muhammed was in a central European city. He has recently been barred from entering Britain but still communicates to followers through the internet. After spending several hours discussing topics such as whether Osama bin Laden could be compared to Martin Luther, it became clear that Abu Muhammed is not "mindless" but a product of the political realities of our planet. He certainly justifies violence in the context of war. He also claims that Tony Blair is responsible for the deaths of thousands more innocent civilians than "Sheikh Osama".

My meeting also convinced me that a government policy (eagerly endorsed by the media) that denies a credible arena for the views of people like him contributes to, rather than reduces, the risk of a violent attack on Britain.

The British media have never been comfortable investigating the causes of "terrorism". In the 1980s, the Thatcher government argued that the IRA depended for survival on "the oxygen of publicity". A former British Army commander in Northern Ireland made the comical claim that "without the exaggerated attention of the media the IRA would probably have languished and died".

In 1988, after a decade of browbeating BBC and ITV bosses, the government announced that supporters of Irish terrorism would be banned from speaking on television or radio. It shied away from a complete ban in print because it could have triggered a revolt over press freedom. Anyway, popular newspapers simply amplified the government's counter-terrorism agenda. The target of the legislation was television, especially current affairs programmes such as Thames Television's Death on the Rock. It had infuriated Thatcher and raised awkward questions concerning the gunning down of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar. The new law allowed members of the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, to be quoted in reported speech. Pictures of the person speaking could be shown so long as the words were voiced-over by someone else or displayed in subtitles.

The law had unforeseen consequence; it brought farce into the coverage of Northern Ireland. Out of work actors began earning £200 for voicing Sinn Fein statements on television. The party's president, Gerry Adams, was told that he was to be dubbed by the actor Stephen Rea in a documentary. Adams replied "Great. His voice is much better than mine".

The Terrorism Act 2006 has avoided the black comedy of Thatcher's censorship but its reach is far wider and the denial of freedom of speech far greater. The act classifies "justifying or glorifying terrorism" as a criminal offence. The law is not directed at what people do but what they say; it is an offence to write or announce anything that might, directly or indirectly, encourage another person to commit an act of serious violence in support of any political cause anywhere in the world. Someone who justifies resistance to occupation, whether in Iraq or the Palestinian territories, is vulnerable to prosecution.

The law is yet to be tested in court but it is already serving one of its intended purposes. It has severed genuine debate between Muslims and the mainstream media. Yet the views of Britain's Muslims are shared by much of the Ummah, the global community of Muslims. Many believe that Britain was attacked in July 2005 not for what it is but for what it does; the presumed leader of the London bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan, said so in a video released by al-Qaida.

Muslims are keenly aware that western politicians can use terrorism to further their own political goals. In the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, Tony Blair joined more than 150 world leaders gathered at the United Nations in New York to mark the organisation's 60th anniversary. Blair held centre stage and one of the primary goals of the meeting was to forge a consensus on the meaning of "terrorism"; secretary general Kofi Annan had pledged to western nations that the UN would agree on a "no excuses" definition. George W. Bush announced before his audience of presidents and prime ministers: "The terrorists must know the world stands united against them".

Predictably, the general assembly failed once more to reach agreement on a clear definition of terrorism. The two sides restated long-held positions: the United States and the European Union condemned any targeting of civilians; the 56-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference insisted on exempting "national liberation movements". Iran and the Palestinians argued that any definition should exclude "the legitimate right of peoples to resist foreign occupation". A member of Pakistan's delegation explained: "The UN must differentiate between terrorists and freedom fighters. If someone is subjugating your civilians . . . and they shoot someone in your family, some people will say, 'OK, I'm going to fight back'."

Blair told the UN that "the root cause of terrorism is not a decision on foreign policy . . . it is a doctrine of fanaticism." Most Muslims would not agree.

In their homes, British Muslims will say one thing to friends and family and another to the mainstream media. There are very few Muslims in the UK who would agree that the killing of innocents is desirable (after all who does?), but a large section would say that the debate about terrorism is missing the point.

But now they do not need the mainstream media. They watch al-Jazeera as well as satellite TV from Muslim countries and a plethora of internet sites that provide a parallel worldview. They believe they have another source of the truth; the BBC and Fleet Street are largely dismissed as government propaganda. Muslim organisations that claim to speak on their behalf are usually considered mouthpieces for specific interests or movements that advise the government in order to claim lucrative grants.

The under-30 generation have taken this disconnect a stage further. Surveys indicate that a large section of this generation - around 20% - at least empathise with the 7/7 bombers. They are growing up in Britain but have no representation in mainstream British media.

Fun-Da-Mental are a popular Muslim punk band. High street shops refuse to handle their disc All is War, The Benefits of G-Had. As they prepared for a festival in St Petersburg - no one will host their gigs in the UK - one of their singers explained the meaning of the song. "It's not about rejecting Britain per se," he told me. "It's rejecting Britain's foreign policy. That's the crux of the problem. It's not about alienation or being disenfranchised or anything like that, it's about foreign policy."

He added with a wry, frustrated smile: "I feel like I'm in a Monty Python sketch - even the people who commit those acts say the reasons and we are still told it's not those reasons. It's so strange."

A policy of excluding extremists is not working. Bush's dictum that "you are either with us or the terrorists" is being applied here and the results are simply pushing more young people into the terrorists' camp. MI5 admits monitoring at least 2,000 British Muslims who are "actively promoting violence".

It was with some irony that I recently watched a 1997 interview with Blair, after he had invited Adams and Martin McGuinness to Downing Street. "If you are at least talking to someone, you have . . . some chance of something better emerging."

Journalists need to present the views of radical Muslims in a way that does not push them toward further violence. Journalism has a duty to reflect and not condemn the views of people such as Abu Muhammed. In denying them a voice, it is contributing to the radicalisation of British Muslims.

· Phil Rees is the author of Dining with Terrorists. His film, Britain Under Attack, is on Channel 4's Dispatches tonight at 8pm.

· The article above was amended on Monday August 6 2007. The first sentence of the second paragraph was changed to "Abu Muhammed, which is not his real name, is also linked to al-Qaida and in tonight's Dispatches on Channel 4, he justifies the July 7 bombings" and not "Abu Muhammed, which is not is also linked to al-Qaida and in tonight's Dispatches on Channel 4, he justifies the July 7 bombings" for clarification.

I thought it was a very good documentary. It actually put another side to the story on as opposed to the Zionist Government view. I thought it did a rather good job of addressing the reasons for 'radicalism' [foreign policy] as opposed to preachers of 'hate'.

A preacher isn't needed to radicalise anyone [the Gov would disagree (look at the comments here)], whereas in reality all you have to do is turn on the TV.

This is a findamental point as was made quite well on that programme.

All those Muslims that said it was the preachers were, in my opinion (ex BNP), made to look like complete fools who didn't have a clue what they were talking about. Are the dillusional or do they just enjoy their fay pay check from the Zionazis too much?

(Dispatches 'Britain Under Attack', 6/8/07, 8pm.)
Here are some points you could make in your own words:
1) Thank the programme-makers for highlighting the central role of foreign policy in causing radicalisation, and the government's refusal to acknowledge this fact.
2) Complain that the trailers and promotion of this programme were sensationalised and inflammatory, portraying Muslims as a threat.

Some further points:
- A broad range of Muslims were interviewed and views such as those of Moazzam Begg made an important contribution.
- The programme mentioned the problem of draconian new anti-terror laws that have been introduced.
- Although Channel 4 billed the programme as being about British Muslims, Abu Mohammed and Omar Bakri who were in the programme representing the extremists are not based in the UK. It is vital to remember how unrepresentative their opinions are and not to provide them a platform to preach their hatred.
- The Islamic prohibitions against harming civilians should have been mentioned.
- The programme should also have shown the efforts of British Muslim organisations such as MPACUK to channel anger at foreign policy into effective action to create change peacefully through the political process.
- The programme addressed Muslim concerns that the government in their work to de-radicalise young British Muslims, are attempting to delete chunks from our religion, such as Ummah and Jihad. Muslims are outraged by this and want the government to understand and accept Islam for the peaceful religion that it is.
- In the scene where the RUSI conference was shown, policy-makers described the views of extremists as a “cancer” when it is in fact an ideology just like the BNP. It could be solved if the government accepts the role of the foreign policy in fuelling extremism and takes the necessary steps to address the issue.

With more and more documentaries about Islam and Muslims it is more important than ever that we make our voices heard - it will only takes 5 minutes to contact Channel 4 with your comments. All comments from the public are logged and circulated to the programme-makers, to inform future programmes.

Review:

Phil Rees produced an interesting documentary on this sensitive topic. He has covered it from many angles, speaking to people from all sides of the arguments. Among the many points that were critically examined were the idea that Islam and the West are incompatible and that Muslims see the 'War on Terror' as 'War on Islam'. There was also a discussion of the theological argument used by extremists to justify attacking Britain and whether the presence of British troops in Muslim lands has broken the covenant between Britain and its Muslim citizens.

The programme also talked about the Muslim allegiance to the Ummah and whether this was more important than nationhood. It looked at government-supported programmes to de-radicalise young British Muslims (details of which were extremely secretive) and efforts to promote a depoliticised Sufism as the acceptable face of Islam in the U.K.

The programme highlighted the way the government is keen to promote Muslim groups that are prepared to ignore foreign policy and the suffering of the Ummah - groups such as the Sufi Muslim Council. Haras Rafiq, a member of the Sufi Muslim Council filmed by Channel 4's Dispatches said Muslims have more important concerns than Iraq and Palestine, such as GCSEs and overdrafts. He also repeated his scaremongering about British Muslims:
"A percentage of people actually agree and support proactively the people that are deciding to blow themselves up. It varies; it can be 7 per cent, 5 per cent, 9 per cent."

From where does he get his figures!? Just think of a number, any number....

Haras Rafiq is the one that the British government looks to as an expert of "extremism"? No wonder they cannot solve any problems. These ex-"Islamists" (i.e. Hassan Butt, "Ed" Hussein) and groups like the Sufi Council of Britain only seek to serve as a cover for the failed policies of the British government.

All this nonsense about "political Islam" being the source of the problem shows how disingenuous these government officials and their pet Muslims really are. They never seek to resolve the foreign policy issues that give rise and creditability to extremism, only compound the issue by attacking Islam as a whole.

LONDON (Reuters) - A second Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about British Muslims is under investigation, police said on Wednesday.

The Metropolitan police said it was assessing the contents of the programme "Britain Under Attack", which was shown on Monday, to determine if any offence had been committed.

The programme featured clerics justifying and encouraging attacks on British soil in the name of Islamic brotherhood, the TV channel's Web site said.

A Channel 4 spokeswoman said in a statement that the police had requested untransmitted programme and research material, but it would not hand over the material until a court order had been obtained.

Earlier on Wednesday, it was revealed that West Midlands police had made an official complaint to the country's television regulator about another Channel 4 Dispatches documentary which it said had contained misleading footage about alleged Saudi-inspired extremism in British mosques.

"Dispatches reveals how a message of hatred and segregation is being spread throughout the UK and examines how it is influenced by the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia," the programme's Web site said.

West Midlands police officers found there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against the speakers featured even though they said some of the speeches might be considered "offensive".

Instead, prosecutors said the footage, which provoked anger among Britain's 1.7 million Muslims, had been "heavily edited".

"The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying," said Crown Prosecution Service lawyer Bethan David.

After their initial investigation, police turned their attention to whether the programme-makers themselves were guilty of inciting racial hatred.

But detectives concluded there was not enough evidence and instead have made a formal complaint to Ofcom.

Channel 4 denied any wrongdoing and that it was confident of defending itself against any complaint of unfairness.

"We believe the comments made in the film speak for themselves -- several speakers were clearly shown making abhorrent and extreme comments," said Kevin Sutcliffe, Commissioning Editor for Dispatches.

A lawmaker whose constituency covers one of the mosques implicated in the documentary, Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, called the decision not to prosecute the speakers as "gutless, spineless and a cop out".

However Abu Usamah, one of the preachers featured in the programme, told the BBC: "To try and demonise the efforts of these people by taking their comments out of context was shocking."